THE NEW YORKER 27 thirty. We're at the stage now where we can begin to think seriously about put- tIng them back in the field and learning how to rein- troduce them into the wild. The best and the most natura] way of dOIng this is to take the young falcons and foster them to wild parents"-foundlings on the doorstep. "This works great. But in the East, of course, where we have no wild falcons left breed- ing at all, we are stuck with having to use the old, abandoned aerie sites, many of which still look to be very good places to put falcons. " The problem is getting the young falcons to associ- ate themselves with a particular site and to use it when they come to breed- ing age. "Here, again, I think the falconer's technique of hacking will come into play and be of consider- able signIficance in getting these birds reëstablished," Dr. Cade said. "This simply is taking young falcons (we're going to start a hacking experiment right here today)-taking them be- fore they can fly, putting them out in the area that you wish to establish them in, taking care of them until they're in- dependent and hunting on their own, and then hoping that during that period of formation of their early hab- its of hunting and fixation of habitat they will home back to this place to breed when they are two or three years old. Now, not only natural sites but also artificial sites are pos- sible places to reintroduce peregrines. \V e know this because, particularly in Europe, peregrines even today fre- quently use old buildings or other structures-man-created structures- for nesting. They will even nest right in the center of villages, and on bridge tiers and other man-created structures. So this leads us to think that we might be able either to build special breeding towers or to USe existing towers and modify them to suit the needs of the falcons " A few minutes after the press con- ference, which was held in the Bio- medical Laboratory at Edgewood, Dr. Cade, Dr Temple, and a number of other people boarded helicopters and flew over to the island where the gun- nery tower is situated-eight hundred and fifty-five acres of salt marsh, open meadow, and woodland-which at some time or other during the year harbors nearly three hundred species of ., .. -- "Y ou're an illiterate and I'm an tntellectual, but we still respect each other's point of view. That's democracy, right?" . birds. .Lt\mong those who made the trip were Dr. F. Prescott \Vard, the chief of the Ecological Research Office of the Biomedical Laboratory, and Tom Smylie, an ebullient public-affairs offi- cer with the Fish and Wildlife Service, who lives in Albuquerque, where he trains peregrine falcons and does re- search on golden eagles. At the base of the tower, Dr. Temple knelt and opened up an ordinary cardboard box that had been brought along. In it were four cabbage-size birds, downy white with black wing feathers. They set up a raucous cry, like four rapidly squeaking rusty hinges. Dr. Temple picked up the box and began climbing the tower's ladder. Dr. Cade followed. The birds continued to squawk. Dr. \Vard, remaining below, told an onlooker, "Initially, we're going to band these birds and also track them with tiny radio transmitters that will be attached to a tail feathér with den- tal acrylic. The transmitter will have a tiny whip antenna, and we can check the birds' movements with a directional receiver. Of course, when the birds molt, they'll drop the feathers with the transmitters. \Ve haven't named them yet, so for the time being we'll juSt identify them by their bands- AE I, AE II, AE III, and AE IV The 'AE' is for 'Alpha Echo,' which has absolutely no significance." Smylie stood nearby. On his arm perched Kelty, a two-year-old female peregrine, bred at Cornell, who is a sister of AE I, II, III, and IV. "We'll be feeding the young birds with dead feral quail at first, and hope they'll soon be able to feed themselves," he said. "Unfortunately, the mortality rate of predatory birds in the wild these days is sixty or seventy per cent. . Some of our Arctic peregrines mi- grate to South America in the fall and pIck up pesticides there. \Ve can ban D DT here, but the birds can still get it into their systems down there So we'll consider ourselves extremely lucky if we do get a breeding pair out of these four birds. It is a milestone in wildlife management." Atop the tower, Dr. Cade and Dr. Temple removed the four peregrines from the cardboard box and put them in the nesting box, which can be closed up. "\V e'lllock them in for a week or so-just until they get used to it," Dr. Cade said. "And to protect them for now from other predators, like owls." Inside the nesting box, the young pere- grines stared out through wooden bars, looking somewhat ruffled and angry, and stopped squawking. From this spot, when they learn to hunt on their own, they will command a bird's-eye attack zone of perhaps fifty miles on a clear day-treeline and field, swamp and shoreline. \Vith the birds hushed, Dr. Temple and Dr. Cade began the slow de- scent of the iron ladder. At the bot- tom, everyone looked slightly nervous but happy: Phase 1 of the experiment completed. Three add i t ion al East Coast release sites will be chosen soon. "I can't think of another project of this scope that has ever been successfully performed," Dr. Cade said. "With the coöperation that we now have from so many organizations-a coöperation that has been made possible, or at least formalized, by the Endangered Species Act of 1973-1 think that with the techniques we now have we should see peregrines nesting again in the Eastern United States We hope by the end of this decade."